The Rev. Josephine Robertson
All Saints Episcopal Church, Bellevue
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (readings)
Our readings this Sunday are full of unexpected calling, upheaval, and change.
There’s Isaiah who starts out this whole prophet thing convinced he is absolutely unfit for the job. God choses him anyway, and this section of Isaiah includes God (through a seraph intermediary) burning away any and all excuses ole Isaiah might have had, removing the interior barriers to accepting God’s call.
In first Corinthians we hear Paul rehearse how last and least he is among Jesus’ apostles. He glosses over his own “knocked off his ass” experience and how his life pivoted 180 degrees there in the dust, but we know the rest of the story, and so did the Corinthians.
And finally in the Gospel today we have Luke’s account of Jesus’ calling of some of his closest friends and disciples, Simon (who would become Peter), and James and John. His inner circle as it were. In a few verses these hapless three go from just doing their jobs to dropping everything and setting out after Jesus into the unknown.
It is almost as if there is a pattern…
There’s an annoyingly glib saying that tends to bounce around discernment processes and nominating committees in the church. “God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies the called.” And as much as it annoys me for being so glib it is also kind of the pattern of scripture.
Over and over again God waltzes into the lives of people who are minding their own business, who are otherwise entirely unremarkable and turns everything upside down for them. As the kids today would say: rude. But in all seriousness, God asks.
It is one of the things I find most striking in our scriptures. Sure God totally overturns people’s lives but there is the implication in our stories that those folks could have said no. In the text from Isaiah the voice of the Lord isn’t heard saying “Isaiah you shall go,” but asking the question: “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah might have surprised himself by shouting “send me!” But he said it.
And Simon and James and John, well they could have said: “listen Jesus, the was amazing and all but our parents are old and need our help, we’ve got families and kids to feed. We just can’t.” But they didn’t. They set down their nets and they chose to follow.
We too get a choice. Because never fear, God is constantly walking into our lives and offering to overturn them. The question is: will we take off our shoes and approach the burning bush? Will we let the seraph touch us with a coal from the altar of heaven? Will we follow when we are called out of our expected future?
Stories of call are almost always told with 20/20 hindsight. They weren’t written in the midst of the messy middle when the prophet is wondering what the heck they are doing there, when the disciples are despairing in some upper room while Jesus dies. We have the advantage in scripture of long hindsight. Of people who lived through the upsets God invited them into and years later could look back and say “ah, I see what you did there God, I get it now.”
We are in the middle of our own invitation to upset. We don’t yet have the luxury of hindsight. We don’t yet know where the story leads for us. But I believe we can look to scripture, to all those people called by God in scripture for assurance that God is with us. As our lives and community changes, as we are invited to let go of what was and imagine something new.
It is what people who encounter God have been called to since the first human had that first flash of revelation. God moves, God is going somewhere, and we might not be able to see that destination, we might not ever finish that journey but we are invited to come along.
The journey itself will probably be full of highs and lows which I think we’ve all been around enough to know is true. There will be dark valleys and high stunning vistas. What we must remember is that none of them are the destination. The destination God’s got in mind is somewhere further on.
Beyond the lakeside, beyond the mountain, beyond Gethsemane and Golgotha, and the garden of the empty tomb. The road winds on, and God invites us to go too.